Projecting young people’s voice in Bulwell 

Project lead: Tara Webster-Deakin 

City as Lab is a data partner in Nottingham’s bid to become a UNICEF Child-Friendly City and the evaluation partner of Child Friendly Creative City, an ambitious three-year £1.5m programme, funded by the Arts Council, to nurture children and young people's participation in arts, culture and creativity across Nottingham.  

Growing from these partnerships, City as Lab recruited Dr. Tara Webster-Deakin to lead a project developing the skills of young people as community researchers. Specifically, the project explored how a purpose-built PARM (3D interactive map) can help support local communities to collect data, share data and build stories about ‘place’ to better understand wants and needs. There was a particular interest in exploring the experience of place from the perspective of young people in one of Nottingham’s socio-economically challenged areas, Bulwell.   

Bulwell is the second most deprived ward in Nottingham city and ranks as the 110th most deprived out of England's 7,412 wards. Young people (under 16) account for 23.4% of the ward population which is higher than that of Nottingham city (18.8%) and nationally (18.3%). Bulwell has a higher proportion (41.4%) of children aged 0 - 15 yrs living in poverty as compared to Nottingham city (29.8%).   

Bulwell’s local community partnership group, One Vision Partnership (OVP), provided insights into the challenges faced by local residents and some of the work and volunteering that was being led locally to combat this. A group of Year 9 ‘young researchers’ engaged with the PARM as a stimuli and then met with Tara, an expert in ‘Youth Participatory Action Research’, once a week for six months to develop their research skills while they gathered local perspectives about Bulwell.  

The pupils’ research led to several outputs:  

• A commissioned piece of art telling the ‘story’ of their research findings  

• A presentation to the senior leaders in their school  

• Data and perspectives which, via the PARM, then stimulated residents’ consultation at the Bulwell Arts Festival  

• An aspiration-raising visit for the pupils and their parents to the University of Nottingham  

The impact of engaging with the voice of young people in Bulwell as a starting point for deeper discussions and collection of data via the PARM is ongoing. More connections were made during the week of the Bulwell Arts Festival with public, OVP colleagues, councillors and festival contributors. The artwork will be hung in Bulwell Academy’s Community Hub and City as Lab now sponsors the ‘Learning Champion’ award for this school. Learning from this project is helping to inform a second community PARM project in the Meadows, another area of deprivation in the city.  

Inspired by this project? Tell us your ideas